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Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it! What’s better than a free-range organic turkey? A new Plex/Seven release!

We really appreciate all the feedback on the first in the Plex/Seven series. We have new features in the works, new ideas, and a great deal of enthusiasm and energy for this new series. So much so, in fact, that we’ve postponed the Plex/Six stable series release briefly to bring new a new installment in the Plex/Seven series. The good news is that hopefully we’ve fixed many of the issues keeping people away from Plex/Seven.

The release can be downloaded via Sparkle, HTTP, or built from source.

NEW: Aperture support. James and I had a bet on who could finish first, I took Lightroom and he took Aperture. I’m sure you can guess who won. Same killer features as iPhoto and iTunes, including automatic reloading of databases, and access across the network.

NEW: Ryan greatly enhanced the CoreAudio driver, cutting out lots of old crufty code in the process. Not only does this fix the problem with fuzzy audio at low volumes and incorrect playback speed, but it also add some features that audiophiles will appreciate. The legacy XBMC code was performing a bunch of useless format conversions, whereas his new code converts from source format directly to 32 floating point, which is the CoreAudio native format. This means you can now play back 24-bit 96KHz media, at full fidelity. Ryan explains more in his blog post.

NEW: James enhanced the Programs area of Plex. Workflows can be added to the root-level menu, folders can be added as sources, workflows can be selected by navigating into folders. (Plex quits when starting workflows, releasing control of the Apple remote). Additionally, you can run Applescript scripts from the Scripts menu, or by mapping them directly to keys in the keymap files. This opens up lots of possibilities!

NEW: The Plex Media Server generates thumbs for artists, per request (picks an album thumb).

FIX: Lots of people had been asking for volume control via Apple Remote. While there’s nothing we can do about encoded digital audio volume (AC3/DTS) there are plenty of people who listen to music and videos in stereo. Hence, we’ve remapped some of the keys in an attempt to improve matters (and fixed a related bug in the process). The new mapping is as follows: up and down control volume in full-screen. Since the buttons are quite limited on the Apple Remote, we removed FF and REW and replaced them with big skip forward and back when holding left/right keys. This makes some logical sense, as hitting right takes a small skip forward, while *holding* right takes a larger step (and similar with the left button). Try it out, let us know what you think.

FIX: Really slow stream buffering of some Shoutcast streams.

FIX: Lots of Plex Media Server bugs fixed, including crash on Apple Lossless files, glitchy sound on start of track, incorrect play speed, crash at end of video podcast, and crash with no iPhoto libraries.

FIX: We now disable UPnP client by default, because it causes crashes (e.g. when waking from sleep). You can also now go into network settings and disable it.

FIX: Disable PlexHelper when launching EyeTV client (James).

FIX: Crash when in TV shows and theme music enabled (James).

FIX: Playing DRM tracks from Plex library now works (James).

FIX: Crash when skipping to the next track when playing a DRM music track with an iTunes visualizer enabled.

FIX: James fixed setting a source to be the default. For example, you can set the iTunes Plex Media Server source to be the default, and you’ll go directly there from the main menu.

FIX: Volume no longer affects visualizations.

FIX: A ton of iTunes visualizers fixes, including not showing new track information, crash when scanning for visualizers, support for new Disco iTunes visualizer, and iTunes visualizers not being offset/sized correctly for calibrated screens.

FIX: Some fixes for keyboard layout switching (thanks to Roman) and updates to KinoPoisk.Ru scraper.

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38 Comments

elan November 28, 2008 at 9:47 am

@Eddie G: I would say shortly after the Thanksgiving holidays

@Drama: As long as you’re using the Plex Media Server, all your art should show up perfectly (from iTunes, ID3 tags, and cover art files). If you’re having problems, please post more details to the forums and we’ll look into them. I see 100% album art even over the network with my set up.

@Jakob Metzger: It’s a known issue and has to do with the architecture of the iTunes plugins. They really want their own window to render to, and don’t play well with the layering of the OSD.

I kinda figured that out. I noticed that it is exactly the same OSD as the regular iTunes windows. If iTunes ever stops being gay, the layover on itunes visualizer would be sick!

Are there any other visualizations that we could use?

Anton November 29, 2008 at 9:20 pm

Hi,
Thanks for the app. I’ve switched from Sapphire, some things I love some thing I hate. Overall great tool. One thing that won my heart is DTS! More and more movies I download have DTS audio, it it drove me nuts when all I had was just stereo playing through my receiver with 5 speakers.
One thing though, it seems that playing some VIDEO TS folders, DVD folders, crashing Plex. And after it crashes, none other videos are playing, even AVIs and MKVs that played before until I reboot the system. I’ve tested couple of my TS folders, there was one that played, at least two others did not. I’ve tired of rebooting the system.
Any information would be appreciated!
Thanks guys, and keep up the good work!

Bug: When entering a remote itunes library IP the on-screen keyboard is stuck on “5” and you cant save the changes.

Juan December 4, 2008 at 1:36 pm

Hi
Excellent, simply the best, no doubt.

Many questions, but only one here:

Is it possible to have as source the Optical Drive, no regard what the disc could be inside. Now if you want to enter in a CD you must add it as source, and then, when you eject it, you must delete that source.

(Another, ……
Why Plex ignores the non-write permission bit in the files when you ask for deleting a file?

Could it the right-button pop-up functions menu be customized? I’ll be enchanted if I could made it easier to delete those already seen films, etc…

H264 Speed boost setting changes back to “Disabled” when I leave the menu & come back. The actual value in guisettings.xml works as it should I guess skiploopfilter gets values 0, 1 or 2 (disabled, medium, high).

Coming from an old xbox (xbmc), the very possibility of having it in the mac was awesome. One day it was able to play fullhd mkvs in the mini awaking my enthusiasm for this piece of art that is the mini and this was the best day in my lately mac live. How in the hell!

The bell and whistles you are adding to Plex make it a serious commercial application.

But, appart from some small problems I found very strange the behaviour it has with files. I use a lot the pull down menu “Delete file” (a bit uncomfortable to use with AppleRemote), but it is driving me crazy. I don’t know how to protect some files from deletion. Plex ignores the UNIX non-writable bit “-r–r–r–” (444) and delete the file without any respect. !!!

With xbmc I used to simply leave the owner of the file different from the user (xbox) that logged in my mac; simply that made the magic.